It is important to note that some altcoins innovate by experimenting with useful characteristics Bitcoin does not offer. For instance, Ripple serves as a protocol users can employ to make inter-currency payments with ease, BitShares describes itself as “a fair version of Wall Street,” and Darkcoin hopes to provide a platform for completely anonymous transactions. Some altcoin ecosystems, such as Mastercoin and CounterParty, even utilize the Bitcoin blockchain to secure their platform.

Here’s a story about a completely random Norwegian student who bought 5000 bitcoins for $27 back in 2009. Today, with a single bitcoin pushing past $2700, those 5000 bitcoins are worth over $13.5 million. That’s a gain of over 500,000X. No other investment in recorded history that I’ve been able to discover has ever come close to touching these sorts of gains.
Some bitcoin exchanges allow account holders to short — bet that bitcoin will fall in value — but the ordinary investor cannot do this as easily with bitcoin as with stocks or exchange-traded funds. Shorting is easy on the futures markets, however, as the trader simply buys a contract to sell a block of bitcoin at today's price sometime in the future. If it works out the price will fall and the bet will pay the difference.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, this is far more difficult, if not impossible, to do with cryptocurrency, more than even normal investment vehicles like stocks. I’ve seen people who think that bitcoin has hit a peak and must necessarily stop going up sell, intending to wait until bitcoin falls again to buy in again and make maybe a 20% extra profit, miss out entirely because bitcoin kept going up and never came back down. There are numerous stories of those who bought into bitcoin at $1 or less, but sold well before it ever reached even $10, much less $2500.

It’s human nature to panic when something unexpected enters the fray, and cryptocurrency trading is no different. Experts agree that this human reflex is one major weakness in crypto trading beginners. This usually happens when the market takes an unexpected turn and the strategy that is being employed suddenly does not seem optimal for market conditions. In this state of panic, beginner investors frequently abandon their strategy if they did not expect or plan for these changes, leaving a considerable amount of value left unclaimed.

This, too, is not merely a theoretical matter. Ethereum did indeed hard fork after the DAO hack, and split off into ETH (the current dominant blockchain for ethereum) and ETC (the ‘classic’, or original blockchain for ethereum). As of this time, ETC is worth over $20 a coin — more, in fact, than all of ethereum was worth before the hack. Had I kept my ethereum on Coinbase or another exchange like it at the time of the hard fork, I personally would have lost 5 figures in ETC (at present values) merely because the exchanges wouldn’t give me access to these coins that I rightfully owned.

A Trezor also allows you to set multiple passwords that open secret vaults to different wallets on your device, such that even if in some crazy scenario someone just kidnaps you and threatens to beat you with a wrench until you give them your coins, you can just give them a second password to another wallet that holds say $500 in cryptocurrency instead of $10 million, and there’s no way for them to know that that’s not all the money you had on your Trezor.

At the same time, I also see a million and one ways where bitcoin fails to reach the promised land. Bitcoin has already experienced numerous growing pains, and at the present moment, is suffering most acutely from a huge backlog of transactions that can’t be fit on the blockchain. This is because blocks are presently limited to 1 MB in size, and can consequently fit only a small fraction of all the transactions that are trying to be propagated over the network. This forces those who want to have their transactions go through to pay inordinately high transaction fees in order to prioritize their transaction over other transactions.
All of this said, while these principles can and should be kept in mind at large for just about any investment, cryptocurrencies are dramatically different from stocks, bonds, or any other sort of traditional investment vehicle. They’re also so early stage and so volatile that it’s a near-certainty that a value investor like Benjamin Graham wouldn’t even dream of labeling such opportunities as investments, rather than speculations (at best, they would be labeled growth investments, but I’m working with the Buffett philosophy that there is no difference between ‘value’ and ‘growth’ investing, and that good value investing appropriately takes into account growth).
There isn't a way to invest in Bitcoin the way you would invest in the stock of a company. But depending on the long-term plan for your newfound cryptocurrency, buying Bitcoin and monitoring its value can technically make you an investor of sorts. By attempting to buy bitcoin at the lowest price and sell at a higher rate, you could make money off your purchase like an investment.

Bitcoin has forced itself to become an investment; the severe volatility its value goes through on a daily and even hourly basis makes it much harder to use as currency. By the time a bitcoin transaction is complete, it could be worth less than it was when you first tried to use it. That has made it seem more viable as an investment than as a currency to many, but investment analysts remain wary of bitcoin still.

Investors in any Vehicle must have the financial ability, sophistication, experience and willingness to bear the risks of an investment in that Vehicle. Any offering or solicitation will be made only to certain qualified investors who are “accredited investors” as defined under Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933 (the “Securities Act”). Qualified investors may only invest in a Vehicle pursuant to documentation made available by Grayscale, which should be read in its entirety. Information provided about a Vehicle is not intended to be, nor should it be construed or used as, investment, tax or legal advice, an investment recommendation, or an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, shares in any Vehicle. Any offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy shares in any Vehicle is made only by delivery to qualified investors of the offering documents for that Vehicle (the “Offering Documents”), which contain material information not available on this website and which, in the event of conflict, supersede any information available on this website in its entirety. In making an investment decision, investors must rely on their own examination of the applicable Vehicle and the terms of the offering contemplated by the applicable Offering Documents, including the risks involved.
The biggest risk when investing and trading is you: your emotions, biases, and beliefs. This strategy tries to remove the “you” as much as possible from the equation. This article accurately depicts the biases and shortcomings we all have. The markets are not rational; almost everyone lets their emotions (such as FOMO and panic-selling) get the best of them. In the end, big money will always beat you if you don’t come to terms with these cold hard truths.
NEW YORK, Dec. 29, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Grayscale Investments, LLC, the sponsor (the "Sponsor") of the Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX: GBTC) (the "Trust"), announced that it has today declared a distribution and established a record date for the distribution of the rights to Bitcoin Segwit2X tokens currently held by the Trust as a result of the fork in the Bitcoin blockchain on December 28, 2017 to shareholders of record ("Record Date Shareholders") as of the close of business on January 8, 2018 (the "Record Date").
Bitcoin hit its 2018 low early on Feb. 6, the morning of a key Senate cryptocurrency hearing, briefly undercutting $6,000. The chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission both urged stronger oversight. But the financial regulators stopped short of sounding an alarm. Nor did they call for any legislation to rein in cryptocurrencies. In the weeks after that hearing, Bitcoin rebounded to around $11,000 but it has retreated yet again to below $7,000.
It’s a social platform for traders to monetize their knowledge/advice and creates an all in one platform for trading. The team is very professional and they provide regular updates on Reddit and Medium – development work on the platform is done on daily basis. 2018 is planned for marketing and that should see the price rocket. They also need to be listed on some bigger exchange (right now on Cryptopia) as they barely missed the boat to be listed on Binance.
Formerly known as Coinbase’s GDAX (Global Digital Asset Exchange), Coinbase Pro is for more advanced and active crypto traders. Switching over from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro, or moving assets from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro is simple enough. On the homepage, just click on the option in the upper left corner: Deposit. Look here, courtesy of The Coinbase Blog, :
"This isn't comparable to other markets since what is unique about cryptocurrencies is that you can transfer ownership from peer to peer in a short amount of time and receive the actual asset," he says. "Settlement happens instantaneously and allows people to trade in a more free environment while the futures contracts are for institutional buyers."
I hope that this elucidation provides some insight into why I personally see it as suspect to invest in something based on price alone, and why I urge extreme caution particularly if one is exploring whether or not to invest in an altcoin, especially if one is at least partially motivated to do so because of the feeling that the ship has already sailed for bitcoin, and that there might be better potential for outsized gains with a smaller altcoin. Again, this certainly may be true, and often is true even for altcoins destined for eventual failure in the short term while a bubble/bull market continues, but risks are amplified just as much as the opportunity itself when it comes to altcoins, and oftentimes moreso in a bubble than otherwise.
No. 5: Regulatory approval for a crypto ETF is most likely imminent: There is an obvious need for a sector or a market-based exchange traded fund to help investors diversify risk. Several crypto companies, such as Gemini and Bitwise, have filed for crypto ETFs, but so far, regulators have not approved any. However, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission might be shifting its position. They agency is now more concerned about curbing fraud on platforms that propose ETFs rather than the ETFs themselves. We believe the SEC could soon approve a crypto ETF.